Should be the default answer:
Play another game.
No other discussion needed, no argument to be had.
5 Likes
You will take my
Narcissus
All The Things
Aardvark
CraftSim
Nova Instance Tracker
TSM
Altoholic
Worthit
Rarity
HandyNotes
Gathermate
From my
cold
dead
hands
7 Likes
lol??? You obviously have been playing to long. You can pick up this game and play for an extremely long time before you get to a point where an addon feels necessary. A new player isnât walking into M+ or raiding.
A new player is running around killing stuff in the world and doing normal dungeons. A new players is just trying to stay out of the fire under their feet. A new player is checking out the random house in the middle of a field to see if anything interesting is there. A new player is trying to make a few gold to buy bags.
A new player is NOT comparing their damage to everyone else. A new player is NOT doing high end mechanics where you need 5 timers going. A new player is NOT trying to perfect their rotation.
GD likes to think they understand the game. The problem is that they understand it to well. They canât even pretend to understand what itâs like to be a new player.
tl;dr addons are fine. Leave them alone.
3 Likes
Addons fall into three categories for the most part.
Quality of Life
Display of Information
Cosmetic
The quality of life addons are the ones that organize your bags or bank. They keep timers for world events and rare spawns.
Quality of life also overlap with Display of information. WoW has a lot of information coming in to the player. Some is necessary other is clutter. Abilities have cooldowns, and timers, on both players and enemies. Abilities need to be interrupted. Cooldowns give damage windows. Information constantly coming in.
What a lot of addons do is change how you want this information displayed. Do you consolidate it into an area centralized around your character, so that your eyes can see take in the information easily while watching for mechanics to move from peripherally? Do you want your quest tracker, and side bars hidden during combat? Where you do you want to see the timer for your damage window when you activate your cooldown? Does a boss have an ability which requires a lot of movement that they cast every 30 seconds? Do you want to track that so you can time your cooldown use?
None of this is really game breaking. And these are the majority of addons. They simply allow you to organize the information coming in and reduce your cognitive load, so you can focus on playing your character well.
When you get into the very high end, which only a very very small percentage of the WoW players play at, they will take things to the extreme. And even in this extreme, the addons are not playing the game for them, they are just further distilling the information coming in, and displaying it in the way which the players want. In order to kill the hardest mythic raid bosses, you may need to time the fight down to where at 3min 20 seconds into the fight, you have the CDs of these 3 players coming off CD and they specifically are to pop them all at 3min 30 seconds to meet a dps check.
Again just organizing the information to reduce cognitive load. There are the other addons which help players with rotations. They are nice to learn from, but you dont just turn them on and they activate the abilities in a set order.
The other thing is that addon creators can simply do a better job than Blizzard at making them. Blizzard would have to build a department and staff it of addon developers to work with the UI department to create this. It would be costly and inefficient, when people just make extremely good addons for the game as is.
All of these arguments you list are arbitrary. The addons and addon community have been an integral part of WoWâs success and are not going anywhere. And at the end of the day you dont have to play with addons.
1 Like
Donât you touch my add-ons for my ui. It will end poorly.
2 Likes
The most important add-on I have keeps track of where my mouse is because I lose track of it a lot
1 Like
this âideaâ is as dumb now as it was in 2023
3 Likes
When I use to raid in World of Warcraft from 2004-2011, I was literally told you need this add-on or this add-on or you wonât be raiding. I remember one addon that literally did come close to playing the game because it drew on the screen where to go or who to be near with.
Personally, the major add-on I use is Spartan UI. I really cannot stand the default and upgraded UI that Blizzard made. Because of Spartan I am also forced to load Bartender4 else the addon doesnât work correctly. I do have Deadly Boss Mobs loaded, but I rarely go into a dungeon for its use since I mostly do world content these days.
Ever Quest and Star Wars: The old Republic, I didnât use addons and they actually where fun to play without them. Only reason I donât play them is Ever Quest just isnât appeasing graphically (2 is definitely better) and I found a bug in SW:TOR and reported it and got suspended for 3 days and they took all my gold from 5 years of farming content on top of that (about 750-800 million).
I really need this. For some reason I keep losing my mouse on the screen and I keep moving it around and itâs like come on pointer where did you go.
i agree, addons that assist people in doing the content forces the Devs to increase the difficulty of the raid or dungeon just to keep up. Testing the content before the raid are released should end. How can someone have a world first when they run the damn things a billion times before they are released to the general public. In house testing should do.
1 Like
Probably not gonna happen. Weâre going on two decades with addons and I just donât see them going away. Too many people rely on them and prefer them that Iâm sure Blizzard would fear theyâd lose a lot of subs for what some players would see as moving backwards. Blizzard also doesnât seem to want to stop making raids with ridiculous mechanics.
What I could see Blizzard doing eventually is implementing a handful of new addon-free servers. You roll on one of those servers and automatically all of your installed addons are disabled. This could give those who want a âCleanâ WoW experience to have exactly that.
1 Like
I could roll with this, but that will take years if we use classic as an example. The major downside of this would be the fragmentation of the World of Warcraft player base even more than it currently is. Would really be nice to show where the player base truly is playing the game then estimates like Bellular did in his one video that pegs wow currently player base around 7 million players.
1 Like
You just describe the problem of current WoW, while forget about potential new players.
It is unacceptable that a game relies so heavily on third party stuff to have acceptable user experience.
Putting story, lore, class or balance aside, WoW UI and addons alone are disastrous for attracting new players.
This game isnât going to survive or not based on new players, I think everyone knows that. The addon process is pretty easy honestly. If you can turn on a PC and use Windows, you can use an addon. You are being very, very dramatic.
2 Likes
Donât use them if it bothers you.
You do whatâs right for you, and Iâll do whatâs right for me.
2 Likes
This idea is so terrible that it isnât even fun-bad. Killing addons would devastate RP servers, make people fight blizzardâs clunky ui (seriously, people have a minimum of one row of buffs at all times, good luck tracking what is important in there) and make raid fights an absolute slog given the lack of standardized indicators. It brings free problems and no benefits.
2 Likes
Yes, how terrible it is that we have the opportunity for nearly infinite customization and unlimited personalization. My gosh, how does this game even still exist?
/clutches pearls tightly
1 Like
Agreed. The add-ons play the game. The bosses are scaled around add-ons. Mythics and raids cannot be achieved by playing without a synergized, perfect optimized build, and exploiting the fotm class. I remember when most the battle was forming a group. Playing wow at an optimal level is just not fun. Meta pots, enchants, world buffs etc. I blame the 1 percent that mythics are designed for.
1 Like
Dunno about ALL addons.
but things like dbm, bigwigs, WA, lossa, omnicc, details, logging/parsing addons etc absolutely need removed.
1 Like
I agree personally Iâm tired of needing a 180 part weak aura to track everything in the game for mythic raiding. I basically only want a DPS meter.
1 Like
Which is about to happen next week if the changes go through that will block comms that some addons use.
1 Like